When a first-grader’s wrong answer was better than the right one

Here are a few tweets that stand all on their own for entertainment value, the work of Bret Turner, a teacher at the private Head-Royce School in the hills of Oakland, Calif.

Turner has been teaching for seven years in the first and second grades, and is also a musician and writer, sourdough baker and self-proclaimed “baseball statistics nut.” He lives in the San Francisco Bay area and has two young children as well as a three-legged dog.

Turner said in an email that he is new to Twitter and surprised that these tweets were popular.

The first guess from one of my 1st graders was “death” and such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didn’t want to tell them that actually the answer is the letter e, which just seemed so banal in the moment pic.twitter.com/7sYFxHNcZk

Before I finally revealed the "correct" answer to the riddle, to a largely unimpressed audience, I fielded other guesses that continued along a similarly existential vein. There was "NOT everything," "all stuff," "the end," and maybe my favorite, "nothingthing."